Musicians have a big advantage over pro sports people in that they can go broke, blow up whatever but still make a comeback. I'm off to see fleetwood Mac tomorrow night. They are in their 70s and still able to pull a crowd. Amazing really. Off hand I can think of few other careers where a group of 70year olds can be so prominent. Even politicians tend to struggle around then
I know plenty of lawyers in their 70s who go to court and are still heading up law firms. Not unusual here (having practiced law until 19990, a lot of my friends are lawyers). Lots of doctors, too.
But as you say, not many will draw a crowd of thousands of people. My brother and his wife went to see Paul McCartney the other night - I didn't hear about the tickets going on sale due to recent surgery a few months back - and they said the show was great, the crowd packed and excited.
Just a side comment - Our culture does not value wisdom and experience the way that other cultures do. This has both positives and negatives. If you work at it, you can continue to grow as person & professionally into your 70's (at least I hope - only in my 60's now
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My grandfather was an active real estate developer until he was 91, and he was a cool guy who really knew how to live. People loved him. So he was a great example of what you can do as you age gracefully!
Yeah, it's a bit of a strange thing for sure. It's some of the reason that I've always struggled with my job. I've been here a long time. I can't afford to quit. At the same time I feel like I was meant to do something more. Not necessarily to the scope you speak of in the examples of Paul and Steve. They are visionaries and game changers. I think it's sometimes forgotten the general state of the musical instrument industry's quality prior to PRS coming into the scene. There were a lot of poorly made instruments being made. There was A LOT more searching for "the one"... the right guitar, a special guitar. You had to find one that was well built, which at times was a huge task. Then to find one that was "magic" was another story. Not to mention the beauty aspect. I believe PRS pretty much single handedly forced guitar makers to build better quality and better looking instruments. The guitar building industry today as whole builds better quality instruments. I balked a little when the SE line was first introduced. Aside from there being a market for the line, when I realized that the SE would be a great quality instrument, capable of pro use in a price range that most can afford, I was on board. Those who couldn't previously afford a great playing and great looking guitar, now could.
So true, Vaughn! And you know, we all want to do more stuff at times -- that's the reason I got into music halfway through life, and left my law practice behind. Though it's not something I recommend for everyone, it has been a hell of an interesting ride!
That said, it isn't the game changers of the world that make it worth living. It is the steady anchors. Much of what the world is changing into is destructive.
You can be a game changer AND a steady anchor, but I don't disagree that both are needed, and in my humble opinion, the world must rely on BOTH. And some game-changers founded this country, or became philosophers, or invented the damned light bulb. Game changing is often very, very good.
As for what the world is changing into...in the middle ages your chances of being killed via violence were about ten times higher. In ancient times, higher still (yes, there have been studies on this). If your city was taken, you were dead meat, or enslaved. And there was brutal slavery on top of everything else for thousands of years. And debtors' workhouses later on. Not to mention plagues, witch hunts, burnings at the stake, and other abominations.
Every generation thinks the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Read some Roman history - Augustus tried to turn back the clock and restore "Roman values" to the empire with morals laws in 30 BC.
And think back only seventy years -- 50 MILLION people were killed in all the theaters of World War II. 50 MILLION people whose lives and stories and accomplishments vanished from the face of the earth, in only 6 years (1939-1945). The vast majority of the dead weren't soldiers, either. Tell me that the world has devolved from that carnage - you can't. It was ultra-violence, mass murder, rape and pillage on an incredibly vast, government-sanctioned, mechanized scale from Europe to Asia, to the Pacific region, to the shores of the US where ships were torpedoed for quite some time right on the gulf coast, to North Africa and you didn't want to be a Pole or a Jew or Ukranian, Belorussian, or Chinese for most of that time. Heck, at the end, you didn't want to be a German or Japanese. You just wanted it to stop.
And from 1934-1939, Stalin killed millions of his own people by purposeful starvation and purges. Estimates range as high as
Fourteen Million people. The numbers are staggering, but they get blurred because the very same regions with most of the victims of Stalin were later invaded by, and victimized by Hitler.
Speaking of victims, how about the forced death marches that the Turkish government imposed on the Armenians in 1915? One million deaths at the very least. One million. Lost in the mists of time to most folks, because WWI was an allied victory, and that all got pushed under the armistice deal's rug.
I could go on. There have been bloodthirsty lunatics in the human race forever, and many of them ran governments. Pol Pot in Cambodia comes to mind.
So sure, things are changing, and some of the changes aren't good. But some of the changes aren't bad. In any case, there haven't been 50 million deaths in a 6 year period in most of our lifetimes. Our parents and grandparents (depending on your age) saw and experienced a hell that none of us ever will if we stay lucky.
I don't mean to lecture, but we constantly hear about how things are going south, when in fact, history has lessons to teach us, and to some degree, the human race seems to be on the verge of learning some of those lessons.
The problem is that life is so short that each generation forgets (or never knew about) the failings of the recent past, and how bad things can get. And then in times of peace, we look around and say, "Oh, things were better back then." Well, they weren't. In fact, it's not even close.
In any case, PRS is run by a game-changer whose work I appreciate.
